Deep Thought
If this article means what I think it means, then Douglas Adams has been reaffirmed. It seems that a quantum computer has managed to find the answer to a question without knowing what the question was in the first place, just like a certain computer in Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The mind boggles.
“In a sense, it is the possibility that the algorithm could run which prevents the algorithm from running,” Kwiat said. “That is at the heart of quantum interrogation schemes, and to my mind, quantum mechanics doesn’t get any more mysterious than this.”
Yikes. Imagine trying to debug that…
“quantum interrogation is a technique that makes use of wave-particle duality (in this case, of photons) to search a region of space without actually entering that region of space.” – Sounds like scifi ‘scanners’/’sensors’ to me – being able to tell what is out there without looking, or going there.